This article considers the relationship between business ethics and philosophy, specifically in relation to the field and persons working in it. The starting point is a grammatical one: business ethics by the rules of grammar belongs to ethics. In terms of academic disciplines, it belongs to applied ethics, which belongs to ethics, which belongs to practical philosophy, which belongs to philosophy. However, in the field of business ethics today one will seldom meet colleagues from philosophy; instead, they will come from (...) business, applying business studies perspectives, approaches, and increasingly quantitative methods. This article provides empirical evidence that today the three top journals with “business ethics” in their titles are mostly run by business scholars with PhDs in business. The article compares the three journals today with their inaugural issues and finds that at their inception all three were run by a majority of philosophers. The article discusses six possible explanations for this shift and provides suggestions for how to bring business ethics back to philosophers. (shrink)

Recent conceptualization of built‐in versus bolted‐on corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives has offered a much‐needed distinguishing framework to sophisticate our understanding of why different CSR initiatives yield varying corporate social performance (CSP) and associated recognition from stakeholders. One of the major roadblocks in conducting research on these two types of CSR initiatives is the absence of a valid and reliable measure. We address this void by developing a measure for bolted‐on versus built‐in CSR that relies on coding publicly available content. (...) Our measure of these two types of CSR initiatives tests favorably for both convergent and discriminant validity and inter‐rater reliability. Advancement of such a measurement instrument will positively contribute to CSR research, enabling scholars to better theorize the linkage between CSR and reputation, and other aspects of firm performance. (shrink)

This study focuses on examining the thematic landscape of the history of scholarly publication in business ethics. We analyze the titles, abstracts, full texts, and citation information of all research papers published in the field’s leading journal, the Journal of Business Ethics, from its inaugural issue in February 1982 until December 2016—a dataset that comprises 6308 articles and 42 million words. Our key method is a computational algorithm known as probabilistic topic modeling, which we use to examine objectively the field’s (...) latent thematic landscape based on the vast volume of scholarly texts. This “big-data” approach allows us not only to provide time-specific snapshots of various research topics, but also to track the dynamic evolution of each topic over time. We further examine the pattern of individual papers’ topic diversity and the influence of individual papers’ topic diversity on their impact over time. We conclude this study with our recommendation for future studies in business ethics research. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.